1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to apparatus for forming groups of battery plates.
2. Description of the Related Art
A number of forms of batteries use metal plates arranged in linked groups disposed in compartments in the battery box. Often some of the plates are enveloped in insulating porous material to allow positive and negative plates to be held apart, whilst allowing the passage of electrolyte. It is accordingly necessary to assemble groups of plates so that they can have straps cast onto their terminals before insertion into their respective compartment. Traditionally this assembly of groups was extremely labour intensive and rather slow. In more recent years steps have been taken to automate the procedure and to increase the speed at which groups are formed. In addition the plates have become more and more delicate.
The current arrangements have the plates, often in mini stacks of an enveloped and an unenveloped plate, being delivered at spaced intervals to the end of a conveyor where they are shot off, across a gap into a pocket formed on a downstream conveyor. All the plates which enter a single pocket form a group. This leads to significant timing difficulties and the delicate plates can readily become damaged.
To assist in the timing it is known to have an interrupt device at the end of the upstream conveyor, which can temporarily contain a first mini stack for sufficiently long for the next mini stack to be delivered on top of the first restrained mini stack. However, in order to achieve this a ramp has to be introduced through the bed of the conveyor to enable the following mini stack to take off and land on the retained first mini stack. This introduces considerable difficulties in maintaining alignment and is very difficult to control with any accuracy at high speed.